Gonna try something new today, because I can't think of anything serious or thoughtful to talk about today (also, posting several days late, MY BAD, YOU GUYS.) So instead I'm going to talk about a movie franchise that I really like.
Today I want to talk about Predator.
Lauded as one of the manliest movies ever made, Predator is about a group of mercenaries, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who find themselves in a jungle being hunted by an alien.
For the technical stuff- the movie wasn't given great reviews at first, panned by most critics as a mindless shooter with a paper-thin plot. I won't argue with any of those points- the first time I saw the movie, I didn't even realize there was a plot, and it took me two further viewings to realize what the plot actually was in its entirety. Nonetheless, the movie managed to make $98 million dollars at the box office, and remains quite popular to this day.
What Predator is, is a mindless action flick with an alien. It doesn't pretend that it isn't and it doesn't try to be anything more than that. The pacing is perfect- it's fast enough that it both never bores and never gives you a chance to actually think about how the plot is mostly non-existent. There's a great sense of location- you can almost feel the muggy heat rolling off the jungle, and the forest itself feels both too close and too huge. It doesn’t do a great job of letting you know where the jungle is exactly (I always thought it was in Mexico) but you really get a good feel for the jungle.
What's also brilliant is the predator itself. The visage of the predator is iconic; not as iconic as, say, Darth Vader's mask, but definitely up there. In the first and second Predator movies, the predator is played by the late, great Kevin Peter Hall. Before Predator, it never really occurred to me that the person in the suit was particularly important- they got the body from point A to point B, and then the animatronics and CGI did the rest.
Boy was I wrong. Hall adds a lot of character to the predator, managing to make it seem powerful physically, but also adding a sense of grace to it, a lithe ease that really makes you believe the creature in front of you is real. One of the most startling things for me was watching Alien vs Predator and seeing how different the species as a whole comes off without that sense of grace. With Ian White under the mask, the predator felt more bulky, more like a walking slab of muscle- really strong, but also a little too stiff and awkward, the little movements of the hands and head feeling more like a man in a suit than an actual creature. I found that a little distracting, and a little disappointing.
My biggest complaint for this movie is how little they actually show the predator. In Alien, they show you bits and pieces of the xenomorph, never giving you too big of a picture at any one time. And for that movie, it works. It helps to set up the atmosphere, and lets us feel the same terror and bewilderment the characters feel.
In Predator, they try to do the same thing, or at least something similar, and... well, it doesn't exactly work. It's not that big a deal at first, when all we see of the predator is a camouflaged, indistinct figure, or we see stuff from the predator’s point of view. But then we start seeing it do some really cool stuff, like ripping spines out of corpses, and applying alien first aid and suddenly that becomes way more interesting than whatever the hell the humans are doing.
I find the constant bait-and-switch of "thirty seconds of predator for every ten minutes of human" really frustrating, to the point where I almost prefer Predator 2 if only because the predator got more screen time in it.
Speaking of the humans, remember how I said this was considered one of the manliest movies ever made? Yeah. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, and Sonny Landham. It also has Richard Chaves and Shane Black, but they aren’t as manly and anyway Black is more of a screenwriter than an actor so he doesn’t really count. This movie practically bleeds machismo, and it helps (or doesn’t, depending on your point of view) that the actors were all trying to out-manly each other off screen. No, really. Jesse and Arnold had a bicep measuring contest (Arnold won).
The manliness is also helped along by the fact that there’s only one (1) woman in the entire movie. Interestingly enough for a movie like this, she’s neither a romantic interest nor incredibly hot. Instead, she’s actually relevant to the plot! No, really, she has lines and is a catalyst for events and everything! There’s the bit about how they find her in a camp full of Russian guys who are preparing an invasion onto US soil (or maybe it’s just a country the US is friendly with, it’s never really clear) and it’s never explained why she was there and I never really could figure out why they didn’t just shoot her instead of bringing her along.
Overall though, it's a great movie, and I love it to bits. The fight scenes are fantastic, and there’s this one scene where they shoot the shit out of the forest in a really memorable and totally kickass scene. It's one of my favorite movies, both for the brainless fun the action provides, and for the awesome look of the predator itself.
If you haven't seen this movie yet, you should- if only because it's one of those really iconic movies all the cool kids are referencing.
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